Mago is in Karmic!!

Yes, if you updated your Karmic repositories lately, you can install Mago just typing “sudo apt-get install mago”. What does that mean? Not much, for the moment.

We have packaged the library and harness, but not the tests. Once you have installed Mago in your machine, you can start writing tests using the library, you will be able to run the tests with the Mago harness and get nice reports in XML and HTML. You won’t have the already written tests, though. Tests change a lot, so it does not make sense to keep them in the repositories, which are quite static. PPAs are a much better place for tests, which I am planning to maintain.

The main advantage of having Mago in the repositories is that, if a project wants to use it as part of the testing of their daily builds, they can set Mago as a Build-Depends of the project and forget about whether Mago is installed or not in the build machine. And, don’t worry, I will be updating the documentation and setting up the tests PPAs after my holidays, but, in the mean time, Mago is there, ready before Feature Freeze. Happy testing!

Excellent! One promising idea for Mago that I talked about a bit at UDS is integrating Mago directly into a package build script for use as both a testing framework and as a profiling guide for GCC Profile Guided Optimization. Doing this could give a cpu-bound package a substantial performance boost essentially for free.